K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Me and ATI: Things keep getting better

It’s been a long time since I used a machine with an ATI card, and this latest one has been a very pleasant surprise.

It was my hope — and probably the hope of a lot of people — that when ATI moved toward open-source drivers, performance would explode. Granted, a Radeon Mobility FireGL 9000 is rather far removed from cutting edge, what with only 32Mb to work with and nothing in the way of upper-end video power. “Explode” might be more like “pop.”

It’s the little things you have to appreciate though. The same thrill I got when I was able to one-click install the proprietary driver for a knuckle-busting Radeon XPress 200M way back when Hardy came out … I get now when I boot the live CD for 9.04 and it goes straight to accelerated graphics mode.

It’s that driver — the “radeon” one, the one Ubuntu picks by default and Arch seems more than happy to run. In the old days that was the one I had to fall back to, if the proprietary one didn’t do its job. Performance was baseline.

But now, it’s fantastic.

I am relatively new to this entire Linux thing — my three or four years with Ubuntu et al. is a mere speck against the grand scheme of things. But I find it reassuring that, this time at least, the premise of releasing code seems to have worked. In my favor, at least.

It’s the price of popularity, I guess. Technically everything here is GFDL’ed, so it’s okay, so long as everything they cut-and-paste is likewise GFDL’ed. (Yeah, right.)

There was a big stink on Planet Ubuntu a while back because someone was cutting-and-pasting into a site in Venezuela, I think. There was a lot of righteous indignation and shaking of fists, and then people settled down and went back to navel-gazing.

I don’t see that it matters, really. People are going to steal content no matter what. If anything actually ever became popular, it might be worth enforcing that GFDL. But I have a low opinion of my own content, so I don’t ever see it happening.

If nobody stands up for the GFDL, the GFDL loses even more respect. But I’m even more concerned by this method of disguising the content — I doubt any automatic search software that currently exists would catch it easily.😦

Yup, I read it. And as offensive as I personally find plagarizing someone else’s work is, I find it even more offensive when it violates a GNU license of any kind. (Not that it’s logical to feel addtional upsetitude…)

The ironic thing is, it appears to be running on WordPress.org software.😕

If K.Mandla’s not going to get upset about it, I’m not either. But if he changes his mind, or if I find it happens to me, I’m going to take action. I mean, if people want to repost my content elsewhere, and they obey the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence, I’m flattered. I’m pretty sure the GFDL is similar, though, and the only reason someone would create a search-engine blog is to make money (Commerical violation), and the creator of it makes it appear they came up with it themselves, however badly (Attribution violation)👿

Um…I’ll stop the rant here; my 2.6.30.6 kernel is done compiling and reinstalling on my Thinkpad, there are strange issues with mounting ext4 read-writeable, and it’s 1:34am local time. So, g’night, and after I mess with the kernel a bit more I’ll post something over on my blog about it.